jeffmoth retweeted
@grok Is Loudoun County VA the richest county in the USA? Also, does Loudoun County reside in Data Center Alley, the same area that houses the most data centers in the world?
jeffmoth retweeted
If you're a young American, or a Democrat who's a little confused about where all this is going, read this. It's long. It's worth it.
Start with misery.
For almost all of human history, misery wasn't a crisis. It was the default. Your ancestors were born poor, lived poor, buried half their children, and died poor. Around 1800, roughly 9 out of 10 humans lived in what we'd now call extreme poverty. Even kings lived worse than you: no antibiotics, no anesthesia, no light after sunset.
Today it's around 1 in 10.
That didn't happen because someone finally designed the perfect system. It happened because, in a few corners of the world, people were left free enough to trade, try, fail, and try again. Property rights. Prices. Contracts. Rule of law. Boring words. They built everything you have.
Now meet Friedrich Hayek.
An Austrian economist who watched his continent fall to two ideologies that both promised to organize society from the top. In 1944 he wrote The Road to Serfdom. A year later he wrote a short essay that should be required reading in every high school: The Use of Knowledge in Society.
His insight is simple and devastating. The knowledge needed to run an economy doesn't exist in one place. It's scattered across millions of heads: the baker who knows flour just got expensive, the nurse who knows which shift is understaffed, the farmer who knows his soil. No committee, no ministry, no genius can gather it all. Prices are the miracle that lets all that knowledge talk to itself without anyone being in charge.
When you replace prices with plans, you don't get a smarter economy. You get a blind one.
His friend Karl Popper made the same point about history itself in The Poverty of Historicism, a book dedicated to the countless people who died because someone believed history had a destination and that he alone knew the way.
Then the 20th century ran the experiment. Not once. Everywhere.
The Soviet Union was planned from Moscow. It collapsed in 1991, after famines, gulags, and bread lines in a country with some of the best farmland on earth.
Mao's China gave us the Great Leap Forward and tens of millions dead of hunger. Then Deng opened markets in 1978, and roughly 800 million people escaped extreme poverty. Same people. Same culture. Different rules.
Korea: same peninsula, same language, same ancestors. Look at a satellite photo at night. One half is lit. The other is dark.
Germany: one nation split in two. The side that called itself the workers' paradise had to build a wall to stop its workers from leaving.
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. Nearly 8 million people have fled it.
Cambodia lost about a quarter of its population in the name of starting over from year zero.
Every time. Different continents, different cultures, different leaders, same ending. At some point it's not bad luck. It's the design.
"But I mean Denmark." Fair. But Denmark isn't socialist. Its own prime minister told a Harvard audience in 2015 that Denmark is a market economy. The Nordics are free-market countries that chose to fund a big welfare state with the wealth markets created. That's a debate worth having. It's not the same debate.
Now let me tell you about my country.
France is the closest thing the developed world has to a live test of "the state will take care of it." Public spending is around 57% of GDP, among the highest on earth. Public debt is above 110% of GDP. The national education system employs over a million people, one of the biggest employers in the world.
And right now, French high school students are blockading hundreds of schools. Their complaints: not enough teachers, crumbling buildings, overloaded schedules. On October 1st, the entrance hall of a high school in Nantes was destroyed by a deliberate fire during a blockade.
Read that again. In the country that spends more than almost anyone and centralizes more than almost anyone, kids are in the street because the system can't give them a teacher and a building that works.
And the demand you hear most? More funding. More state. More of what built the problem.
I'm French. I get the anger. The anger is legitimate. The diagnosis is backwards.
One ministry in Paris trying to run thousands of schools is Hayek's problem in miniature. The principal knows which teacher is missing. The parents know which roof leaks. The ministry knows a spreadsheet.
So here's what I want to say to every young person, in France or in America, who's tempted by the idea that the system just needs more power to finally get it right:
You're allowed to want it. That's your right. But you don't have to guess. You have something no generation before you had: the full archive. Every experiment has been run, documented, photographed, counted. The famines have numbers. The walls have dates. The boat people have names. The night photo of Korea is one click away.
Your ancestors paid for that knowledge. Some with their savings, some with their freedom, many with their lives. They left you the results.
Respect your ancestors. Read what they left you.
Read Hayek. Read Popper. Read Solzhenitsyn. Read Orwell, who was a socialist and still told the truth about totalitarianism.
And then build. Because the thing that pulled humanity out of misery was never a plan. It was millions of free people trying things.
That's you. That's the job.
jeffmoth retweeted
Today I'm going to explain why socialism can never work, even if you're 8 years old.
Not with statistics. Not with the body count, even though it runs into the tens of millions. With a school playground and a bag of marbles.
By the end, you'll understand what Mises, Hayek and the whole Austrian School proved more than a hundred years ago, and what the Soviet Union then spent seventy years confirming.
Picture a schoolyard. Thirty kids. Marbles.
There are clay marbles, glass marbles, agates, big shooters, and a few cat's eyes that everybody fights over.
Nobody ever decided what a shooter is worth. And yet every kid knows: a shooter is worth about five glass marbles. An agate, three. A clay marble, almost nothing.
Who set those prices? Nobody. They appeared on their own, through trading. Every trade is a kid saying: "I want that thing more than what I've got in my hand." Thousands of little trades like that end up creating a "marble exchange rate" that everyone knows, even though nobody ever wrote it down anywhere.
And that rate is alive. A new kid shows up in September and he's crazy about agates? The price of agates goes up. The other kids notice, and that night they dig through their drawers at home to bring more in. Nobody asked them to. The price told them.
Keep that in mind. That's the whole story.
Now a new teacher arrives. She's kind. She means well. And she finds it deeply unfair that Kevin has 200 marbles while Lily has 3.
So she collects every marble in the playground and announces: "From now on, I manage the marbles. I'll distribute them fairly, for the good of everyone."
On paper, it's beautiful. Watch what happens.
First problem: she doesn't know who wants what.
Lily loves blue marbles. Tom doesn't care about marbles at all, he just wants to play soccer. Emma has collected cat's eyes since kindergarten. None of this is written down anywhere. It lives in the heads of thirty kids, and often the kids themselves only discover it at the moment someone offers them a trade.
So the teacher distributes "fairly." And everyone ends up with marbles they don't want.
Second problem: nobody knows what anything is worth anymore.
Before, the exchange rate would have told her that cat's eyes were rare and precious. Now that trading is banned, there is no rate. She's blind. How many agates should she order for next year? How many shooters? No idea. She guesses. She guesses wrong. Next year there are crates of clay marbles nobody wants and not a single cat's eye.
Third problem: nobody makes an effort anymore.
Why bring marbles from home if they end up in the big common bag? Why take care of them if they're not really yours? After a month, there are fewer marbles in the playground than on day one.
Fourth problem, the most important one: the kids start trading again. In secret. Behind the gym.
Because Lily still wants her blue marbles, and Tom would happily hand his over for half a cookie. Trading is natural. You can ban it, but you can't stop people from wanting things.
So the teacher has to choose. Either she lets it happen and her system collapses. Or she starts watching. She searches pockets. She hands out punishments. She appoints "monitors" whose job is to report anyone caught trading.
She hasn't turned evil. She simply has no choice anymore. The plan cannot survive without coercion.
And guess who ends up with the nicest marbles? Not Lily. Not Emma. The monitors. The kids who are close to the teacher.
That's it. You now understand socialism.
Now replace the playground with a country. The thirty kids with hundreds of millions of people. The marbles with millions of different products: steel, wheat, bolts, medicine, size 10 shoes. And the teacher with a planning bureau in Moscow.
That is exactly what the Soviet Union was. The bureau was called Gosplan.
What I just told you isn't a hunch. It's a handful of the strongest arguments in the history of economic thought.
Carl Menger, 1871, founder of the Austrian School: value isn't in the object. It's in the head of the person who wants it. A shooter has no "objective" value. It's worth whatever a kid is willing to give up to get it. Sounds obvious, but it undercuts the foundation of Marxism, which claims value comes from the amount of labor that went into something. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, another Austrian, took Marx apart on exactly this point back in 1896.
Ludwig von Mises, 1920: that's the second problem, calculation. In an essay called "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," he shows that if the state owns all the means of production, there's no market for factories, machines or raw materials. So no prices for them. So no way to know whether it's smarter to put that steel into railroads, tractors or bridges. Without prices, the planner isn't evil. He's blind. Mises wrote this just three years after the Russian Revolution.
Friedrich Hayek, 1945: that's the first problem, knowledge. In "The Use of Knowledge in Society," he explains that the information that runs an economy doesn't exist in any one place. It's scattered across millions of heads: the baker who knows his oven runs cold, the farmer who can feel the rain coming, the truck driver who knows the shortcut. No bureau can collect all of that.
His example is brilliant. A source of tin dries up somewhere in the world. The price of tin rises. And everywhere, millions of people start using less tin, without knowing why, without anyone explaining anything to them. The price carried the information to the entire planet. Hayek compares the price system to a telecommunications system. The price is the marble exchange rate.
Hayek again, 1944, "The Road to Serfdom": that's the fourth problem, coercion. A central plan requires the plans of millions of people to be subordinated to a single one. And since people don't go along willingly, they have to be forced. One chapter of the book is titled "Why the Worst Get on Top": in a system where power decides everything, the people who love power most end up winning. The playground monitors.
Which is exactly what Solzhenitsyn said: socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. It's not an accident along the way. It's mechanical. It's not that bad people took over a good system. It's that the system needs force to hold together.
The Soviets themselves joked about it. An old joke goes like this: a nail factory is given a quota in number of nails, so it produces millions of tiny, useless nails. Gosplan switches the quota to weight, and the factory produces a single one-ton nail. It's a joke, but it's also the calculation problem summed up in two sentences.
Now you're going to tell me: "Sure, but it's 2026. We have AI. A supercomputer can do the teacher's job."
That's the fashionable argument, and it misses the point entirely. The problem was never computing power. The problem is that the information doesn't exist before the trade. Lily herself didn't know how much she cared about blue marbles until someone offered to swap. Preferences change every day. People lie to the planner to get more. And above all, no algorithm can plan for what hasn't been invented yet. Gosplan would never have ordered the iPhone.
And no, Sweden and Denmark are not counterexamples. They're market economies, with private property, free prices and companies that go bankrupt, plus a big welfare state on top. You can debate the right level of taxes. But that's not the socialism Mises and Hayek were talking about: the state owning and planning production.
So, for the 8-year-old, here's the summary.
Nobody knows better than you what you want. Prices are how millions of people talk to each other without ever meeting. Get rid of prices and everyone goes deaf and blind. And when people refuse to follow the plan, there's only one option left: force them.
And for the 80-year-old grandpa who remembers the Berlin Wall, I don't even need to explain. He saw both sides.
Socialism doesn't fail because it was badly implemented. It fails because it asks one brain to do the work of millions of brains. And when it fails, all it has left is force.
jeffmoth retweeted
The actual facts about SpaceX in Ukraine:
- SpaceX is a private company with zero obligation to help Ukraine, yet it stepped up when governments dragged their feet.
- Starlink and Starshield are not the same. Starshield is under U.S. government control. That is who made last night’s call.
- Ukraine accounts for only a micro fraction of SpaceX’s revenue, while the company bears the risks of operating amid Russian attacks and geopolitical pressure. The financial return hardly justifies the exposure. SpaceX helps because it chooses to. Starshield access, meanwhile, is up to the US government.
- SpaceX has every right to set limits on how its technology is used. They own it and bear consequences for it. This is while they actively collaborate to take down Russian access to Starlink that threatens to collapse Ukraine.
- Throwing tantrums over not getting all your demands, including offensive use, or simply because Elon disagrees with you, while SpaceX risks its assets to help, says plenty about your character.
- Demanding a company be nationalized so you can just take its product is the loudest confession that you cannot build anything. You can only steal.
- Europeans should try to build their own. As a space fan, I'd celebrate it.
- I don't care about the politics. But attacking the company that stepped up when it had no obligation to help is pathetic.
The truth is, without Starlink saving Ukrainian communication in the early days, their reality would have severly looked very different today, and they should be grateful.
jeffmoth retweeted
I’m Polish. If France is your future, I come from the end of that road.
France shows you the slow version. We lived the full one – the version where the state doesn’t just take care of everything. It owns everything.
In Poland it arrived with Soviet bayonets. In America it would arrive by vote – slower, softer, with better slogans. But the destination is the same, and so is the mechanism.
It starts with prices. When the state decides what things should cost, prices stop telling the truth. A price is a message: this is scarce, this is wanted, make more of this. Abolish the message, and the whole economy goes deaf. So the shelves emptied – first of meat, then of almost everything.
Every Pole knew the joke. A man walks into a shop: "No meat?" The clerk: "No, sir. Here is no fish. No meat is across the street."
We queued for everything. People wrote their place in line on their palms and kept lists through the night. You waited years for a small car, and often more than a decade for an apartment. Not because Poles were lazy. Because nobody in the system had any reason to produce what we needed.
At work, we had another joke: we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us.
And the promise of equality? It produced the most unequal system of all. The party elite had their own shops – Poles called them the shops behind the yellow curtains. Those with dollars shopped in special stores. Everyone else got the queue.
Then the system needed informers, because nobody believed in it anymore. Our neighbors were recruited to report on us. You never knew who was listening – the colleague, the friend, sometimes family. So we learned to live a double life: one language in public, another at home.
Those who spoke up got the wolf ticket: no job, no promotion, sometimes no university place for their children. Nobody needed to send them to prison. They just couldn’t live.
The newspapers reported record harvests while the shelves stood empty. Everyone knew. Nobody said it. That is what a society looks like when the lie becomes the system.
In 1950 we were about as rich as Spain. By 1989, Spain was twice as rich. That is what forty years of "fairness" cost us.
Today in America, the method is softer. Your neighbor won’t inform on you to the secret police. Someone will report your post, and you’ll be cancelled – no job, no account, no platform. Different tools, same machine.
We got out. Ten million of us joined Solidarity, and in 1989 a system that looked eternal collapsed. Since then, Poland has become one of the great success stories of Europe – because people were finally free to build.
But we still carry it. More than thirty years later, you can see it in the careful answers, the closed faces - the system leaves faster than the fear does. It takes generations to get out of it fully once you fall into that trap.
Nobody votes for the queue. Nobody votes for the informer. They come with the promise.
Trust me, you don’t want to go down that road.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
jeffmoth retweeted
Parkinson’s Law – Why the State Bureaucracy Grows When the Work Shrinks
In 1955, a British naval historian wrote a joke for The Economist. Seventy years later, it remains one of the most accurate descriptions of the modern state ever written. Everyone knows the slogan: work expands to fill the time available. Almost no one knows the mechanism underneath it. That mechanism explains Europe.
1. The evidence. Between 1914 and 1928, the Royal Navy lost two thirds of its largest warships. Over the same years the Admiralty – the office that ran the ships – grew by three quarters. There were fewer ships and more men behind desks. Then there was the Colonial Office, which kept growing while the colonies left one by one. It was hiring while the empire was shrinking.
2. The first mechanism. An official who feels overworked has three choices. He can resign, he can share the work with a colleague, or he can ask for two subordinates. He never chooses the colleague, because a colleague is a rival. Two subordinates are a rank. So one tired man becomes three. Then each of the two subordinates feels tired.
3. The second mechanism. Seven people now do what one did, and they keep each other busy with drafts, approvals, and comments on the approvals. Everyone works hard, and nothing is produced. You have been in this meeting. You have been copied on this email. You have watched three people sign the form that one person filled in.
4. The law of triviality. Parkinson noticed that a committee will approve a nuclear reactor in minutes, because nobody understands it. The same committee will debate the bicycle shed for an hour, because everybody does. Bureaucracy does not avoid the important question by accident. It avoids it by design – the small question carries no risk, and on the big one, someone’s name goes on the decision.
5. The ratchet. A business that fails closes. A department that fails gets a bigger budget, because the problem is now bigger. Failure is the bureaucracy’s best argument for itself. This is why the state never shrinks on its own: every problem it does not solve becomes a new office for solving it.
6. The civilizational lesson. Burnham described the managers taking over. Parkinson showed how they breed. Put the two together and you get Brussels. You get France, where the state spends more than half of everything the country produces and still cannot fix a hospital. This is not because the people inside are wicked. It is because the machine works exactly as Parkinson said it would.
7. The vindication. Parkinson was dismissed as a humorist. Then Milei cut Argentina’s ministries in half – and the country did not collapse. It barely noticed, except on the bill. The lesson is simple: you cannot reform a bureaucracy by asking it what to cut. It will always propose to cut the ships – and hire someone to manage the cut.
jeffmoth retweeted
“From the river to the sea” isn’t so fun when it’s the Seine to the Mediterranean, huh?
jeffmoth retweeted
AN IRAQI JUST DROPPED THE TRUTH BOMB THE ENTIRE REGION IS TOO COWARDLY TO SAY OUT LOUD.
This video has been circulating and many have asked to pass it along, so here is my share as it is a direct reference to Netanyahu’s speech at the UN General Assembly, which was delivered on September 24, 2026.
Raith Al-Tamimi, an Iraqi living in the UK, just said what countless Arabs think but are terrified to admit:
He applauds Netanyahu. Always.
When the host clutched her pearls about “war crimes,” he didn’t flinch:
“Oh my dear lady. Every leader who makes a mark on history has to commit war crimes. Show me someone who defends his people the way Netanyahu does.”
He didn’t stop there. He went straight for the throat of the entire “Palestinian cause” industry:
“I applauded a man willing to stand up to the whole world for his people. A man who, to defend the dignity of Israeli women, is willing to destroy the entire world.”
And when she tried the classic “what about Palestinian women and children?” he gutted it:
“That is Mahmoud Abbas’s responsibility, not Netanyahu’s. It’s the Palestinians’ responsibility.
Why is protecting Palestinian women, of all women, the whole world’s job, but not Sinwar’s or Abbas’s?
The women of Morocco are the responsibility of the King of Morocco.
The women of Saudi Arabia are the responsibility of the King of Saudi Arabia.
The women of Iraq are the responsibility of the Iraqi government.
Why would Palestinian women be any different? What is this nonsense?
When Israeli women were taken, who defended them? The Israelis. Period.
Let the Palestinians defend their own women.”
Then he finished the job on the “occupation” myth:
“What occupation? Occupation is when a country exists and its land is occupied. Tell me, where is this country? Name it. What is it called?
An imaginary country that exists in our minds to fuel the wars in our countries.
Our interests lie with Israel.
We have nothing to do with Mahmoud Abbas and nothing to do with Sinwar.”
This is not some Western hasbara talking point. This is an Iraqi man who grew up in the region, who knows the games, the blood, and the excuses and he’s done pretending.
Watch it. Share it. Let the truth cut through the noise.
This needs to be heard.
jeffmoth retweeted
BBC breaking news: Israeli extremists commit war crimes against innocent pilot who was simply trying to pray. Reports from our Middle East correspondent suggest the pilot was an unarmed child.
Ironic to see Starlink’s latest technology satellites being deployed while directly above South Africa….
…which is almost the only country in Africa which denies this hugely beneficial technology to its people.
SpaceX's Starship rocket has successfully reached orbit and deployed its V3 Starlink satellites into orbit for the first time, officially making this Starship's first revenue-generating flight, a major milestone for the company!
Congrats @SpaceX team! Incredible achievement 🚀
jeffmoth retweeted
I’m sure Macklemore will come to her defense.
🚨 IRAN SENTENCES SINGER TO 74 LASHES FOR PERFORMING WITHOUT HIJAB
Iranian singer Parastoo Ahmadi has been sentenced to 74 lashes, a 2-year travel ban and a 2-year ban on artistic activities over her viral December 2024 Caravanserai Concert, where she performed without a hijab.
Eight musicians and production crew members received the same punishment. The concert was streamed online and drew millions of views.
@selenaryan_
jeffmoth retweeted
Hilarious that Palestine is not on the list of locations
🚨 Macklemore announces "Free Palestine Tour" after being fired from Ed Sheeran gigs. tmz.com/2026/09/24/macklemor…
jeffmoth retweeted
Weapons thrown. Bottles. Hitting police with sticks. NOT ONE of these left wing pro Palestine protestors were charged or imprisoned for ANYTHING you see in this video.
Yet a local resident in the ward I represent in Portsmouth, Del Somerville, is now serving 2 years behind bars for swearing and throwing a plastic bottle in the direction of police.
This is what injustice looks like.
jeffmoth retweeted
🫣 Andrew Neil dismantles Labour’s Jonathan Reynolds in one of the most embarrassing moments of the year for the Business Secretary.
You’d think they’d know better, especially sat next to Andrew Neil — the best political journalist in the country, and better than just about anyone with stats, figures and detail.
Reynolds is on @bbcquestiontime boasting about the changes his government has made to get people off benefits and into work. Neil stops him in his tracks:
“Hold on. Your own official forecasts, the Office for Budget Responsibility, under the policies you’ve just talked about, show a relentless rise in the numbers claiming sickness benefit.”
Reynolds is already beginning to panic. He doubles down: “But the incentives have been changed. The amount of money you get has been changed.”
Neil: “Well it doesn’t matter if the numbers are still rising.”
That’s when Reynolds’ brain leaves the building. He says something that makes absolutely no sense given what Neil has just revealed:
“People talk about what they would like to do and what they would do with a system they left behind and then didn’t change. That’s the kind of substantial change that actually makes a difference.”
Can these politicians actually hear themselves? Does he know what he’s saying in response to what he’s just been told? It’s incredible.
Neil is totally baffled by what he’s listening to: “What substantial change have you made if the sickness numbers are still rising?”
Reynolds is now just digging in because he’s got nowhere to go: “If you remove the incentive for people to go straight onto that system, rather than being on universal credit…”
Neil cuts in with another reality check: “But the OBR forecast takes that policy into account and it still shows the numbers rising year after year after year, as does the bill. So what are you doing to make things better?”
Reynolds refuses to acknowledge what Neil is saying and just repeats the same things again.
Painful. They really are absolutely clueless. They think they can just deliver the talking points and no one will notice. That doesn’t work when you’re sat next to @afneil.
Imagine when they told him the seating plan and he realised who was sitting next to him. 😬😂
jeffmoth retweeted
Torsten, when you find the fool who:
😱 Voted for 330 pages of employment red tape
😱 Hiked NI costs by £25 billion
😱 Jacked up rates on businesses
do be sure to tell them precisely what you think.
jeffmoth retweeted
Anyone who cares about the right to protest in our democracy should be deeply concerned by this. Climate protesters,the Palestine movement, animal rights, anti-war, left, right, whether or not we agree with the reason for his protest, we ought all to be united in horror that a guy just got two years in prison for hurling an empty plastic bottle and some sweary words at a policeman. And they processed his punishment in under a week. This is police state territory. Very very frightening.
Man jailed after throwing a plastic bottle and swearing at police during protests in Portsmouth
Del Somerville, 42, has been jailed for two years at Portsmouth Crown Court after pleading guilty to violent disorder after throwing a plastic bottle and swearing at police during an anti-migrant protest in Portsmouth, Hampshire, on September 6.
